Indian-origin director of Google AR will lead Facebook's AR platform

Nikhil Chandhok, Indian-origin Director of Product for Augmented Reality (AR) at Google, is joining **Facebook** to lead product management of its camera team working on AR. [caption id=“attachment_4230795” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. Reuters[/caption] In a Facebook post on 30 January, Chandhok said he is looking forward to build upon a platform that allows for the creation and discovery of global AR experiences everywhere. “Now, as I join the Camera/AR team at Facebook, I’m especially interested in building more conversation and momentum in cross-platform camera services,” Chandhok posted. Chandhok worked on Google’s “ARCore” smartphone AR platform and Daydream VR platform. “While I’m leaving the team at Daydream and Google, I’m proud of the work we did together. We gave developers ARCore and expanded access to augmented reality tools,” he said. “We also designed foundational aspects of AR platforms and explored how people use AR now and how they’ll use it in the future,” Chandhok added. In a bid to bring the AR experience closer to Android users, Google in August 2017 released a new software development kit (SDK) called “ARCore”.

Today is my 1st day at Facebook! There are massive opportunities ahead for AR & I look fwd to joining Facebook as we bring more AR experiences to life - for more people!

— Nikhil Chandhok (@chandhok) January 29, 2018

The platform renders AR capabilities to existing and future Android phones. The company built on the fundamental technologies used in Tango, another AR platform by Google but ARCore is scalable across the Android ecosystem as it doesn’t require any additional hardware. “Today is my 1st day at Facebook! There are massive opportunities ahead for AR & I look fwd to joining Facebook as we bring more AR experiences to life - for more people!” Chandhok later tweeted.